Simi Horwitz is a feature writer and film reviewer based in New York City. In 2022, she received first place for film criticism from the Society for Feature Journalism, and in 2023, a New York Press Club Award for an Entertainment News feature; and three Los Angeles Press Club Awards, including first place for film criticism — all for pieces published in the Forward.
Simi Horwitz
By Simi Horwitz
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Culture In the Oscar shorts category, stories of fraught relationships in Israel
This year’s five Oscar-nominated live action shorts are strong, disturbing and concise (the longest is 45 minutes). Among the issues they explore are law and order, immigration and interracial relations. “Two Distant Strangers” examines police brutality and the African-American’s nightmarish anxiety that he will inevitably encounter it. “Feeling Through” explores the unlikely bond between a…
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Culture For this survivor and member of the French Resistance, the scars remain
“Colette,” Anthony Giacchino’s extraordinary Oscar-nominated short documentary, is at once simple, complex, and nuanced. It tells the story of Colette Marin-Catherine, an elegant, stoic 90-year-old woman, member of a French Resistance family, who lost her older brother Jean Pierre in the Nordhausen slave-labor camp, circa 1945. He was 17 or 18 at the time, and…
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Culture Returning to Poland, chasing ghosts and a lost painting
“Still Life in Lodz,” a new documentary by Polish-Jewish director Slawomir Grunberg, centers on a Jewish woman’s return to her childhood home in Lodz, Poland, She, Lilka Elbaum, and her family were forced to flee no, not during the Holocaust, but in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War and a spike in Polish…
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Culture In Mexico City, a young artist’s affair threatens her Syrian-Jewish community
Set in Mexico City, “Leona” is a coming of age tale that follows a young female muralist who falls in love with a non-Jewish Mexican and winds up essentially disinherited from her own community. The Spanish-language film, which marks the impressive debut of writer-director Issac Cherem — who hails from the tightly-knit, Syrian-Jewish community where…
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Culture The trippy, far-out artist who refused to support the Nazis
In Robin Lutz’s intriguing (yet in the end incomplete) documentary, “M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity,” the iconic Dutch graphic artist (1898-1972), emerges as a complex and entertaining amalgam. He is an intellectual, a curmudgeon, and a tormented artist twisted this way and that over what he perceives to be his own inadequacies. Lutz evokes Escher’s…
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Culture Against all odds, Holocaust survivors retain their optimism — and their music
Directed by Tod Lending, “Saul & Ruby’s Holocaust Survivor Band” recounts the experiences of two Holocaust survivors, Saul Dreier, 91 and Ruby Sosnowicz, 87, who’ve joined forces to form a Klezmer Band that celebrates their survival — or, more to the point, how they’ve thrived despite enduring Holocaust atrocities. A testimony to optimism and resilience,…
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Culture Yes, he sold art to the Nazis — but was he a traitor or a hero?
“The Last Vermeer,” marking producer Dan Friedkin’s directorial debut, is part melodrama and part thriller, but at its core it’s an exploration of moral complexities that regrettably disappears into distracting subplots and a large cast of indistinguishable characters. By the time the viewer appreciates the complicated ethical and psychological questions at play, the film is…
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Culture 43 years after Skokie, Ira Glasser is still fighting for free speech
Freedom of speech is mined territory. Does the first amendment extend to inciting violence? And how do you define “incitement” Just ask 82-year-old Ira Glasser who served as the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for 23 years (1978-2001) and is best known for his involvement with the controversial Skokie case. In 1977,…
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